AUTHOR ARCHIVES

Christopher Mims

February 3, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
For many businesses, big data is superfluous. Except, a recently-published paper on the mathematics of big data reveals, when it isn’t. It turns out there is a kind of data that, like black holes or evil wizards of Middle Earth, only becomes more powerful the larger it grows. What’s more, ...

January 31, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
In Iceland, scientists have just completed a successful experiment in harnessing energy directly from a volcano. But first, a little background: In early 2009, I wrote about an audacious project. Scientists in Iceland were going to attempt to drill into a reservoir of water so much hotter than anything tapped ...

January 30, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Well this is unexpected. Google is selling Motorola, the iconic handset maker it bought for $12.5 billion in May of 2012, to Chinese PC maker Lenovo for $2.91 billion. Google CEO Larry Page has penned a short note about the sale, but he doesn’t get into details. Here’s why the ...

January 29, 2014
January 25 marked the 40th anniversary of the world’s most iconic role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons. Even if you’ve never known the pleasure of wiling away an afternoon bashing Orcs with your 4d6 warhammer, odds are you or someone you know has internalized the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, either ...

January 22, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Data science—the “science” of gathering and parsing the enormous flood of data pouring into America’s more technologically-adept firms—is so hot that even US president Barack Obama has declared it an educational priority. The Harvard Business Review called data science “the sexiest job of the 21st century” (paywall). Startups are producing ...

January 16, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Between December 23 and January 6, more than 100,000 Internet-connected smart “things,” including media players, smart televisions and at least one refrigerator, were part of a network of computers used to send 750,000 spam emails. So says a study just released by enterprise security company Proofpoint. This is the first ...

January 13, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
Imagine trying to compose an email on a keyboard just a tad bigger than a postage stamp. Nuance, whose technology powers speech-recognition systems like Apple’s Siri, thinks it has this problem licked—and it doesn’t involve voice recognition. The key to typing emails on a tiny screen, says Peter Mahoney, chief ...

January 9, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
A doomsday scenario that has long been dismissed by bitcoin’s biggest boosters is now a clear and present danger. At 3am ET Thursday morning, a single bitcoin mining collective known as Ghash.io reached 45% of the computing power of all global bitcoin miners, just six points short of the 51% ...

January 7, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
At the beginning of 2013, the stock price for US electric carmaker Tesla was $32. Now it’s sitting at around $150, after the company’s Model S sedan was named American automotive magazine Car and Driver’s car of the year. And really, that’s just the beginning; Tesla will be shipping 40,000 ...

January 6, 2014
FROM NEXTGOV
For the first time ever, in 2013 smartphones outsold feature phones, and the dean of Silicon Valley tech investing, Marc Andreessen, says that within three years you simply won’t be able to buy a non-smartphone. But what proportion of phones in use right now are smartphones? Less than half, is ...